A few years ago, I broke a large mirror. Between the glass and the back of the wooden frame, I found a copy of the Daily Mail from 11 July 1925. Reading it was a potent lesson – while our behaviour and preoccupations remain pretty much the same, we tend to believe that everything we are experiencing is new.

In one day, selected at random, there were stories expressing shock at the hold creationism still had in the southern US and dismay that cities were all beginning to look the same. Controversy raged over how best to tackle tuberculosis in cattle, while Conservative MPs called for a reduction in the BBC (radio) licence fee. Tom Standage's short and sparky history of information contains many such moments of deja vu. His idea is that social media, sold as the newest game in town, are something Cicero would have recognised. Our anxieties are just as ancient.

It sounds like an eye-catching but vacuous wheeze: how the Romans invented the internet. And there's a little of that patter sprinkled through the book. Graffiti in Pompeii are "wall posts". Wax tablets used for sending messages are the iPads of their day (flat objects from across the ages are going to look similar). Luther's 95 theses "went viral" as did Thomas Paine's revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense. More interestingly, each time there is a ratcheting-up of activity driven by changes in technology, commentators wring their hands in a very familiar way. They complain about the debasement of debate and pernicious effects on minds and morals. Socrates argued that, exposed to writing, people would become "hearers of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear omniscient and will generally know nothing". The Worshipful Company of Stationers worried, in 1641, that "every ignorant person that takes advantage of a lose presse may publish the fancies of every idle brain".

Simply applying the vocabulary of the internet to the distant past isn't, of course, enough. But Standage's central argument seems to be sound. He suggests that mass media, the means of distributing information that we have become so used to, are an aberration, closely linked to the industrial phase of history. Now centralised industrial processes have given way to distributed, technological ones, with individuals at the controls, we are settling back into old ways of doing things.

So the Randolph Hearsts and Lord Rothermeres who did so much to determine what kind of information reached ordinary people are creatures of the 19th and 20th centuries. Before them, news, rumour and wisdom moved horizontally, among people who liked, loved, loathed one another or had interests in common – social networks. Early Christians sent letters that were copied, commented on and copied again. Courtiers in Tudor England exchanged commonplace books that allowed snippets of gossip and poetry to be passed on and added to. Revolutionaries in America and France printed pamphlets that were handed out among sympathisers and replied to in kind by defenders of the status quo.

It was the steam press and the telegraph that shifted the paradigm. The former meant hundreds of thousands of copies of newspapers could be printed, daily. The latter turbocharged the transmission of information, helping to make newspapers more compelling and more profitable. It also began a cascade of technological change, from radio telegraphy to radio telephony and finally television. The means of communication that mattered were suddenly in the hands of the very few, and the very rich.

Now anyone with access to a computer can publish and opinionate; the nature of life online bears comparison with that of the Johnsonian coffee shop. And 21st-century concerns about the mob being able to broadcast every ill-informed, even dangerous fancy, mirror those of Thomas Fuller, a 17th-century clergyman, who argued that pamphlets "cast dirt on the faces of many innocent persons, which dried on by continuance of time can never be washed off".

But is there really nothing new? Is Facebook little more than a modern-day commonplace book? Surely the fact that communication is now global and instantaneous makes a difference? We have already seen how an increase in the volume and frequency of publishing led to a qualitative change in the transmission of information – the shift to mass media. So the unprecedented acceleration of the internet could also create something genuinely new.

It might do; we will have to wait and see. In the meantime, Standage provides a useful reminder that, however much our material environment changes, our behaviour tends to remain the same. And we are social beings. Even when top-down, centralised media were at their height, we made them social – think of the watercooler moment the day after some dramatic twist in a popular TV soap. To believe that technology is able to alter us fundamentally is to fall into the trap of thinking that machines are somehow alien. They are human creations that reflect our needs and desires.

So if the ancients did use their iPad equivalents, it's because they were easily distracted, frivolous, gossipy news junkies with too much to say for themselves – just like us.